this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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Its a bad marketing campaign because it is easily turned into threads like this. Also, I have no idea if USA Today is good or not (I genuinely have never even thought about it).
But it is worth understanding. News outlets need to get funding from somewhere. Some are state funded and I should not need to explain why that introduces biases. Others take massive sponsorship deals from companies and ensure that John Oliver will always have something to talk about. And others run ads to varying degrees of curation.
The last option is subscriptions and those are few and far between.
Its more or less the same thing we saw with ads in general over the 00s. More and more people learned how to block ads so more and more websites needed to add obnoxious flash based ads and insane uses of javascript and so forth to get any impressions. And fewer and fewer "good" companies wanted to advertise to adblock heavy audiences which led to more and more trojans and so forth. Which leads to more and more ad blockers and...
In the case of news media? We mostly see this manifest as less investigative journalism and more listicles and "clickbait" articles because those at least get the facebook crowd to click.
So it is very much worth looking in to more permissive blocklists and even permitlists. Block tracking cookies because fuck that shit. But permit sites that you "trust" to have reasonable ads and look in to finer grain blocklists that still allow the actual ads to be displayed, even if they aren't the ones based on Amazon figuring out you have a foot fetish.
Even though I'm probably not reading it enough to be worth it I pay a yearly online-subscription to one of the newspapers that gained my trust with good investigative pieces in the past.
If everyone was just consuming for free then a newspaper needs to either be heavily funded by a really wealthy person that pays them (and in turn makes it less likely that said newspaper will report against people like that) or the newspaper needs to sell ad-space. So if you are consuming for free AND blocking ads on a website then you are only costing that website money - and in case of newspapers that's not a good thing since it ensures that only those that are publicly funded or funded by billionaires will survive "almost unchanged" while the rest will try to get as populist as possible to the the most amount of clicks to increase their ad-revenue
This is also what nearly killed off local newspapers. It's a huge problem and journalism as a profession is still in the process of adjusting to the new realities.
One of the few sensible people in this thread. Hosting costs big amounts of cash. Paying decent journalists AND EDITORS even more. Their funding has to come from somewhere if you're trying to read news articles for free or using Archive and 9ft lol.
And people talk about reddit being half puns, memes, and pointless THIS comments lol.
They're probably from the "all publicity is good publicity" school of marketing.
Nah. I think they just assumed more people remembered the ad campaign by (if memory serves) The New York Times where they more or less showed every step used to investigate and verify a story before reporting. Also, I would be amazed if that was actually the NYT's campaign which... probably sums things up.
Before they were mismanaged to the shadow realm, Vice was similar. The idea that they very much were "good news" and ACTUAL freedom of speech/the press in contrast to "I want to say all the slurs"
If we are playing "who got here 'first' 50 years ago" then I think we all best get to stepping so that the US Military has all the pipes.
Like I said: Look in to fine grain blocklists. Block ALL the tracking cookies because fuck that shit (and if you think ticking "don't give me curated ads" does anything...). But consider permitlisting the better ad sources so that the internet isn't completely run by profitable hate groups... like we see happening.
The Lemming 'First!' Fallacy lol.